Chilling emails from within Russia’s FSB intelligence service talk about orders “from the very top” for civilians to be taken to concentration camps in a bid to conquer Ukraine.
The extent to which Putin planned to bring Ukraine to heel with extreme violence had it not held out is revealed in emails sent by a source in the FSB to a Russian human rights activist. Under the name Wind of Change, they were sent to Vladimir Osechkin, the founder of Gulagu, which highlights abuses in the country’s prisons. The emails are believed to originally be the work of one FSB officer but it's thought several now contribute to the emails.
The source says that the FSB, with the help of some Russian Military Intelligence, would carry out a “total cleansing” of society and politics in Ukraine. “And after all this, we could install any government in Kiev,” says the source.
The FSB anticipated resistance among the Ukrainian population but was ordered to deal with it ruthlessly in instructions that came “from the very top”.
In the emails, Wind of Change goes into detail about how the measures would be meted out to ordinary Ukrainians who dared to resist the Russian occupiers. This includes a “big terror” that “is being planned for Kherson, which will go through several stages”. The first would be reducing “massive protests down to local skirmishes, and to cause severe injuries to individual protesters”. “As soon as the mass of protests is reduced, the final stage of ‘door-to-door terror’ will begin.
“Here the FSB will play first fiddle and people will be detained in their homes at night during curfew and transferred to Russian territories - concentration camps and worse. “It is assumed that protests will cease completely after such cleansing.”
Russia expert at the Chatham House foreign policy think-tank, Keir Giles, told The Sun Online the documents chime with what we know about Putin’s plans for Ukraine. Giles, the author of Russia's War on Everybody: And What it Means for You, pointed to preparations of mobile crematoria to follow its forces into Ukraine as a signal of Russia's murderous intentions. “If you saw that and they weren’t expecting to fight a war and were expecting to walk in and take over you would ask ‘who was that for?' “So they were planning to execute, murder and dispose of very large numbers of Ukrainian civilians. “That’s what the crematoria were for, that’s what the body bags were for.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that there have been over 16,000 forced deportations carried out by Russia.
Ukrainian Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi said that the Wagner mercenaries trying to take Bakhmut are losing “considerable strength” and “very soon” his forces would take advantage of that “opportunity.” The Wagner Group is so desperate for fighters, it is recruiting on Pornhub.
shocking that it took this long for him to be exposed when he lied about everything.
One of the best-known Americans on the battlefield is James Vasquez. Days after the invasion, Mr. Vasquez, a Connecticut home-improvement contractor, announced that he was leaving for Ukraine. His local newspaper told the tale of a former U.S. Army staff sergeant who left behind his job and family and picked up a rifle and a rucksack on the front line.
Since then, he has posted battlefield videos online, at least once broadcasting his unit’s precise location to everyone, including the opposing side. He used his story to solicit donations. “I was in Kuwait during Desert Storm, and I was in Iraq after 9/11,” Mr. Vasquez said in a fund-raising video. He added, “This is a whole different animal.”
Mr. Vasquez, in fact, was never deployed to Kuwait, Iraq or anywhere else, a Pentagon spokeswoman said. He specialized in fuel and electrical repairs. And he left the Army Reserve not as a sergeant as he claimed, but as a private first class, one of the Army’s lowest ranks.
Still, Mr. Vasquez had easy access to weapons, including American rifles. Where did they come from? “I’m not exactly sure,” Mr. Vasquez said in a text message. The rifles, he added, were “brand-new, out of the box and we have plenty.” He also tweeted that he should not have to worry about international rules of war while in Ukraine.
He fought alongside Da Vinci’s Wolves, a Ukrainian far-right battalion, until this past week, when The Times asked about his false military service claims. He immediately deactivated his Twitter account and said that he might leave Ukraine because the authorities had discovered that he was fighting without a required military contract.
Mr. Vasquez said he had been misrepresenting his military record for decades. He acknowledged being kicked out of the Army but would not talk publicly about why. “I had to tell a million lies to get ahead,” Mr. Vasquez said in an interview. “I didn’t realize it was going to come to this.”
Everything here is written from the perspective of a person who actually wants Russian to win, which I do not, but I am capable of writing from that perspective. Plenty of pro-Russian types on Telegram have written similar things to parts of what you will read below. The tl;dr is that Russia has been fighting this war based on foolish political calculations from Putin, not based on honest military calculations from the commanders in the field. This has caused the Russian military to grossly underperform throughout the war, which continues to this day.
Russia will win, whether you like it or not.
Except Russia is losing right now, and it is losing because it has made stupid choices that are unserious about victory every step of the way:
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Russia tried an initial blitz strategy that assumed Ukraine would not seriously resist, when Russian intelligence told Putin Ukraine would resist, but he chose to believe his sycophants instead. The result was a debacle with enormous Russian losses and two embarrassing retreats from the North. My alternative warplan would have guaranteed Russian victory within months by pocketing and capturing the bulk of Ukraine's veteran forces.
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After suffering initial failures and setbacks, the Russians pivoted to "Hearts of Iron artillery-only challenge" in which they burned through decades of artillery ammunition stockpiles in mere months in order to bully the Ukrainians, and only took a tiny amount of territory in exchange for moonscaping large swaths of Ukraine. Then HIMARS showed up and blew up enough ammo caches that this strategy became unsustainable a few months earlier than otherwise since Russians became ammo-constrained.
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Sergey Surovikin was brought in and did the 1 intelligent thing Russia has done the whole war: HE WENT OVER TO THE DEFENSIVE AND STARTED TO REBUILD RUSSIAN STRENGTH. His plan was to build a strong defense, wait for the next Ukrainian offensive, crush it, then go on the counterattack with his eventual manpower advantage from mobilization, likely in late spring to summer 2023.
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Dumbass Putin, impatient and not willing to give Surovikin's plan a chance, stepped in again with fucking Wagner & Yevgeny Prigozhin strutting with a bunch of bullshit marketing claims about how they could win the war. Wager got huge favoritism in resources and was allowed to burn through tons of men's lives in order to grind down the flanks of Bahkmut. When this eventually worked in very small ways, Putin fired Surovikin & replaced him with Valery Gerasimov with marching orders to go back on the offensive.
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The Russian offensive which began in late January to presented, WASTED ALL THE RESOURCES Surovikin had built up, for NOTHING except a little more land around Bakhmut. This offensive was retarded, and wasted the 1 hope Russia had of making major gains, and instead completely reversed the situation so that Russia is wasting all its strength and opening itself up to a Ukrainian counter-attack JUST LIKE IT DID BEFORE AT KHARKIV. Russia should have been setting up for a Kursk type battle, and instead it just wasted whatever benefits it had from the 1st round of mobilization to set itself up for a Case Blue.
If things continue as they are now, and there is every reason to believe they will, Russia will keep exhausting itself until it completely loses offensive potential. Then Ukraine will counter-attack and likely will break through in at least one area. Whether this break through will be successfully exploited will depend on many factors, but the Russians have put themselves in the worst possible position, all because of emotionally driven and politically driven bungling.
https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1638606792505565196
I know you all aren't lawyers so let me explain this. In literally every US criminal case, the prosecutor is obligated to turn over all evidence they have which could possibly help the defendant, called Brady disclosure. Based on Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963). This is one of the most basic, fundamental rights in the US criminal justice system, and is a very very common basis for defense motions in criminal cases.
This dumbass is a magistrate judge in Denver who’s been selected for a federal district court seat there. His background is that he worked for the U.S. National Labor Relations Board in Denver, Colorado in 2000, then private practice for Rothgerber, Johnson, & Lyons LLP in 2001. In 2011, Judge Crews left Rothgerber and started practicing in a smaller firm, Mastin, Hoffman & Crews. In 2018, Judge Crews was selected to serve as a United States Magistrate Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Colorado.
He's been a magistrate judge for 5 years. Magistrates are the main people who decide discovery issues in criminal cases like Brady motions. There is no excuse for him not to know this. It's unbelievably basic. I'm not a criminal lawyer at all and yet I know all about it just because I worked as an intern at the federal court for only six months when I was in law school! This motherfucker has been on the bench for 5 years!
I can only imagine 1 explanation for why he doesn't know something so basic: he is lazy and doesn't do his job. He has his law clerks (basically law students) do all his work for him, and he just signs off on it.
It's entirely possible that he did not rule on a "Brady Motion" directly styled as such, though any discovery related motion would have implicated Brady. A formal "Brady Motion" would arise when the defense becomes aware of evidence that the prosecution did not turn over, either at trial or afterwards. The reason Brady comes up so often pre-trial is that the defense is always going to threaten that if the prosecution does not fulfill its discovery obligations, the defense will be forced to bring a Brady motion.
He's never even heard of Brady v. Maryland! He claims he recalled the case when asked (a lie) and then said it involved... the 2nd Amendment! LOL.
He's not qualified. He's only there because he's black. What a joke. What a racket. How is the United States going to have a legal system that isn't a total farce when we pick people who couldn't even pass a criminal law bar exam question to be federal judges?
He got exposed as a fraud right after a glowing Newsweek piece heaping praise on him. They got fooled.
Screenshots of what started it: https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1638556661244911616 And yes, those screenshots are from the twitter tranny who hurt his hand a little while ago. I just saw this video of him getting into a fight on the NYT subway and I was laughing my ass off. This is EXACTLY his twitter energy. Imagine being a grown ass man and getting baited into a fistfight with a random jogger.
I followed Vasquez off and on since the war started since he blew up and got somewhat popular. His twitter didn't look like a warfighter to me, though. It looked like a tourist, LARPing. Absolutely 0 combat shown at any point. Not even things like incoming artillery anywhere nearby. Instead, all he showed was walking through past battles and destroyed vehicles, or hanging out somewhere with other dudes with faint gunfire heard in the distance. He always seemed to be focused on getting supplies and shit, and showing off his tacticool & supposed gear he bought with donations. He was never in a trench, and often in a nice new civilian vehicle driving around.
I always thought "for a guy who claims to be in the shit, he sure spends A LOT of time far, far away from the front lines and... no time at all anywhere near them.
He also came across to me as boastful and insecure, major red flag. Anyone "in the shit" would have SHOWN it. That footage is GOLD in that space. When people called him on it, he would flip the fuck out and go on a tirade, threatening to stop posting, etc. This is classic manipulative behavior.
Receipt apparently showing how he was spending everyone's donations.
[r/4chan is not really modded, but has an extremely strict automod that filters the shit out of everything. I have no idea what word is causing this to get filtered, and using different fonts isn't fixing it, so here it is. This is my re-writing of "The Whale"]
The Whale is a movie about a fat man who teaches English online without turning his web cam on. The point of the movie is that he gets triggered by the pizza delivery guy seeing him, so he acts like he cares so much about people being "honest" that he gets himself fired then turns on the cam, his students shit themselves, so he smashes his computer. Then some family shit and he dies.
Imagine how much better the movie would have been if it was about a fat man on 4chan, who spends his time trying to uncover the truth of the world. As the movie progresses, he unlocks each new stage of the big brain meme.
At the same time, after being fired from his job for accidentally referring to a trans coworker as "he", he builds a following on twitch by using a voicechanger to play a cute Vtuber girl with a cute whale hat. His complete understanding of his audience allows him to connect with them in ways no other Vtuber can. His massive success leads him to lead a double life that splits in opposite directions - the morbidly obese 4channer delving into the sources of the banking collapse tracking Soros-funded entities, and the kawaii Vtuber who brings joy to lonely men just like him.
To begin the final act, he learns he only has a short time to live and he needs to get his affairs in order. He struggles to reconcile with family, but in one case his nephew is a simp for his Vtuber persona, and he's able to connect with him in a meaningful and heart-felt way. The camera cuts to show the nephew fapping.
Then, in the penultimate scene, when he is livestreaming to hundreds of thousands of people for his "debut" on a major Vtuber network, his worlds collide, and he turns on his web cam, showing his true self. Before his audience has the time to shit themselves, Kanye West and Nick Fuentez appear on either side of his cam. He launches into a 30 minute tirade against the jews with Kanye laying down a beat and Nick as the hype man. The credits roll as he breaks into German and starts to just recite the collected speeches of Hortler from memory before he finally shits himself and dies.
In a post credits scene, Joe Biden is giving a speech in front of the US capitol on the anniversary of 1/6 denouncing "the Whale" as a "MAGA Republican" when a low, deep rumbling can be heard building in the background. Joe Biden gazes out into the distance "what the hell kidna dog faced pony..." the camera pans out. Tens of thousands of morbidly obese white men wearing whale hats are thundering down the avenues approaching the capitol. This song starts to play. Police with riot shields are trampled underfoot like they weren't even there. the stage and all attendees disappear under the writhing mass, which sweeps into the Capitol like a human tsunami, gutting it. In a wide shot, the Capitol begins to collapse, then another building, then another. The unstoppable force sweeps through DC and the camera fades to black as a panicked newscaster says the whole democrat line of succession was wiped out.
In a dimly lit room, a dozen or so men in Russian military uniforms, their faces concealed by dark balaclavas, stood around a man reading out a letter addressed to President Vladimir Putin. “As of today, we still have not received weapons and ammo,” the man said, identifying his group as soldiers from the 580th Separate howitzer Artillery Division from Serpukhov, a city 62 miles south of Moscow — a unit he said is now stationed in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
“We ask that our guys to be recalled from this assault as they do not possess the necessary training or experience,” the man pleaded, his voice artificially warped to protect his identity. “Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, we are asking you to sort out this situation.” This appeal, which appeared this month on Russian Telegram channels, was just one in a flood of new videos that have surfaced since mid-February, in which recent Russian conscripts have complained about how they are being sent to fight and die on the front lines in Ukraine, using phrases such as “criminal orders” and “senseless assaults.”
One Russian media outlet, Vyorstka, calculated that in one month, recruits from at least 16 regions across Russia have appeared in videos appealing for Putin’s intervention.
Imagine thinking that Putin isn't the one doing this to them in the 1st place.
Scores of conscripts say they are being forced to storm Ukrainian positions as part of Russia’s eastern offensive, without sufficient training, ammunition or weapons.
The flurry of videos signals that the problems that plagued Russia’s invasion throughout its first year are far from resolved, and they offer further evidence that Moscow is relying on a grim tactic of sending waves of soldiers to certain death to soften up Ukrainian positions, ahead of sending in elite, experienced fighters to then gain ground.
It is a known Russian tactic now to send convicts and mobiks in human wave attacks throughout the daylight hours to keep a targeted section of the Ukrainian lines under constant attack, then to launch the real, serious attack at night using experienced and well-equipped troops.
It is an effective strategy at creating breakthroughs at least some of the time. Eventually the defenders get worn down and sleep deprived. However, it comes at a price: high casualties among the Russians doomed to attack during the day, who are sacrificed for the benefit of the more experienced troops scheduled to attack at night.
The tactic is even drawing criticism from pro-Russian war bloggers who question its effectiveness and the pointless loss of life in what they call “meat assaults.” Recruits have complained of being handed guns and told to run at enemy positions and shoot. In one video, recorded on March 7, conscripts in a unit from Irkutsk, a city in Siberia, complained that they were “being sent to the slaughter.” The video was their third public appeal to Putin.
While the strategy of sending waves of so-called “shock troops” is not new, it seems to have become more prevalent as Russia has lost some of its initial artillery advantage. The strategy has been a hallmark of the Wagner mercenary group’s months-long assault on Bakhmut.
U.S. officials estimate that the Wagner group alone has lost 30,000 fighters since the start of the invasion, with thousands killed in action in recent weeks. Meanwhile, Russia’s defense ministry claimed last September that just 5,937 soldiers had been killed in the conflict so far. Western governments project about 200,000 killed and wounded on the Russian side.
One group of recruits from Kaliningrad, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, claiming to be to be Unit 41698 of the 5th Motorized Brigade, said that in their first assault six members of the unit had died in a single trench. “People die for nothing,” said one man, his face covered by a balaclava. “We are not meat. We are ready to fight with dignity, not as meat, in frontal attacks.”
Another video, apparently recorded by Regiment 1453 from Perm and the Sverdlovsk region in the Urals on March 11, spoke of “unjustified losses” and said that during a recent assault four had died and 18 were wounded.
The videos have also highlighted Moscow’s failure to address critical and embarrassing supply problems, which have led to arming soldiers with World War II-era guns and uniforms. Some of those complaints were first raised last autumn, including in an initial wave of videos, which began appearing shortly after Russia began a partial military conscription.
“One should not trust the internet completely because it is full of various fake stories, deception and lies,” Putin said. “The internet is rife with information attacks because information is just another offensive weapon in the modern world, and information attacks are just another effective type of struggle.”
Oh don't we know it, Putin, your boys are active enough in this forum. lol
Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in New York, said that it was unsurprising to see such problems after a year of war for which Russia was ill-prepared, and especially after the steep casualties of recent months. “These recruits are serving involuntarily. They are not being trained properly and do not have the right equipment. Russia is clearly using its scarce sources to arm and equip its best units,” Lee said in a phone interview. “The quality of the force is worse now,” Lee said. “Earlier in the war, the big difference was that Russia had a really substantial artillery advantage, which compensated for a lack of tactical competence in some units. Now that artillery advantage has been reduced.”
The conscripts’ appeals have been echoed by mothers and daughters of mobilized fighters who have recorded their own messages to Putin. In one video, published on March 12, about 20 women appealed to Putin and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, to remove their men from the firing line. “Our men are sent in as meat to storm well-defended points, five people against 100 well-armed enemies,” one woman said. “They are ready to honor their duty to the motherland according to the specialization they trained for, not as assault infantry.”
The complaints have also been echoed by Russia’s war bloggers, some of the more vocal critics of the direction of Putin’s war and the ineptitude of the military command. Analysts said that the new complaints about being deployed as untrained stormtroopers could indicate some failure in Russia’s efforts to train thousands of soldiers over the winter.
Things are not going well for Russia in this war. Human wave attacks and treating your own people like cannon fodder is unsustainable both because you'll run out of men, and because all their families will agitate against the war over time until a critical mass is reached and public opinion breaks.
And the small breakthroughs obtained at high cost are worthless, as they don't lead to larger gains or changes to the bigger picture. The line just moves a tiny bit and the process starts over until the Russians become exhausted.
